social

Tonight I came across Miso, which is basically Foursquare for TV shows. When you’re watching a show or movie, you “check in” and the show gets added to your profile. You can see what your friends are watching, and conversations can be built off of the check-ins. You also gain badges based on your viewing behavior.

I’ve been musing Boxee to watch TV for the past few months. When I listen to music in Boxee, it logs that data to my Last.fm account. (So does my iPhone, home computer, and work computer.) I’ve had this account for years, and it does a pretty fantastic job of recommending new music to me based on a huge dataset.

I hope that Miso can build a recommendation engine as well. I’d also love to see Boxee integrate Miso as well, so that I can check-in to a show from within the app.

Just a couple things on my wish list. Be sure to check out Miso. Read more at MobileBehavior.

LinkedIn recently pushed out version 3.0 of their mobile iPhone/Touch app [iTunes link]. It is a complete rework of the mobile LinkedIn experience. I’ve only had a brief glance, but it already looks more useful.

What I’m really excited about, though, is the inclusion of a new mechanism for connecting accounts with other LinkedIn users. Now if two people are using the iPhone app and want to connect, they can take advantage of the nearfield communication of Bluetooth to provide a handshake between the accounts, instantly connected on LinkedIn after an in-app verification. No more searching for names and e-mail addresses while you try to hunt down the account of the person standing in front of you. Now, standing in front of someone is all the context needed to establish a connection. This is how it should be.

I know that this isn’t the first mobile app to use the context of proximity to exchange information. Bump and Handshake are two notable examples of applications that have done this well already. There was even IR beaming of business cards in the Palm days. However, I believe this may be the first time that a social network as large as LinkedIn has made it so easy to establish a connection with another user.

I wonder how long it will be before the rest of the social media networks integrate this type of connection mechanism into their mobile experiences. I’d love to be able to follow someone on Twitter by launching Tweetie and seeing that they are close to me. If Facebook added this to their app, it would make a friend request that much more intimate and personal. For most instances of my own “social networking” I typically don’t add someone unless I have met them in person. To me, establishing a virtual connection “in real life” makes that connection that much more valuable and pertinent. I’m a fan of anything to ease the transition of an in-person meeting to an online connection.

For the last 7 days I’ve been carrying around an Amazon Kindle e-book reader, thanks to a new loan program from the NCSU Library. I’ve fallen in love with the device, and in these 7 days I’ve read much more than I expected. I’m also a big fan of Shelfari, a site that lets you manage your books on “shelves” (much like Delicious Library on the Mac) with shelves for Read, Plan to Read, Wish List, and so on. In the last week, as I start a new book on the Kindle (the one I have had over 50 books preloaded on it by other students) I’ve had to log into Shelfari and manually add the book onto my shelf for books that I’m currently reading. This feeds me reviews and suggestions on related books.

A few moments ago, as I filled out a rating for a book I just finished (Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely) I started wondering if there was an opprotunity here. What if Shelfari could tap into your Kindle’s information, automatically filling your shelves with books you have on the device. This would deliver an experience quite a bit closer to the way Netflix monitors what movies you have at home, what movies your friends are watching, and what movies you have listed in your queue. I brushed the thought off, though, figuring that for an outfit as small as Shelfari to get so intimately involved with Amazon’s systems would need a level of access that Amazon would be reluctant to give. I also figured that Amazon wouldn’t want to invite such direct competition to their own “Media Library” service.

We just announced that Amazon.com has acquired Shelfari! This is a very exciting time at Shelfari and there are a lot of new opportunities in the future that will benefit all members. In the meantime, members will continue to have access to the great community and tools that you’ve always known and used on the site. You can continue to build virtual bookshelves and socially interact around the books you care about at http://www.shelfari.com/.

We look forward to working with Amazon to continue with our mission of building great communities that celebrate books. Thanks for your interest in Shelfari and Amazon.com.

Happy Reading,
Amanda

It makes sense… as Shelfari has been using Amazon’s repository of information, even providing “Buy This Book at Amazon” links for titles you come across. It will be interesting to see if Amazon leaves Shelfari as it’s own entity, much like Yahoo did when it aquired Flickr, or if it will pull the developers and existing code into Amazon’s own Media Library site. I think that a lot of users would like to see Shelfari remain independent, but as a heavy user of Amazon (as I think most web-savvy readers are) and a hopeful owner of the second revision of the Kindle, I can’t help but hope that Shelfari gets much more tightly integrated into Amazon’s print and electronic book sales systems.

It looks like Yahoo has it’s eyes set on forming a social networking empire. After buying Flickr and Upcoming.org it has now acquired Del.icio.us, a social bookmarking website. I first heard about this from Wired‘s RSS feed this morning, but later read more other places that said that Yahoo plans to offer some integration between Flickr and Del.icio.us in Yahoo’s new “My Web” service. It will be interesting to see how My Web pans out.

I have been using Del.icio.us for quite a while now, but not to it’s fullest potential. I use it to keep sites I may want to find from other locations later, as well as keeping a list of what I deem to be note-worthy videos from Google’s video site. Del.icio.us’s ability to serve RSS feeds based on tags makes it a great tool for building community link pages.